0. Introduction.

"Happiness is an illusion; only suffering is real."
(Voltaire)

0.1 The Naturalisation of Heaven.

This manifesto combines far-fetched utopian advocacy with cold-headed scientific
prediction. The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how nanotechnology and
genetic engineering will eliminate aversive experience from the living world.
Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrates of suffering
will be eradicated completely. "Physical" and "mental" pain alike are destined
to disappear into evolutionary history. The biochemistry of everyday discontents
will be genetically phased out too. Malaise will be replaced by the biochemistry of bliss. Matter and energy will be sculpted
into life-loving super-beings animated by gradients of well-being. The states of mind of our descendants are likely
to be incomprehensibly diverse by comparison with today. Yet all will share
at least one common feature: a sublime and all-pervasive happiness.

This feeling of absolute
well-being will surpass anything contemporary human neurochemistry can imagine, let alone sustain. The story gets better. Post-human
states of magical joy will be biologically refined, multiplied and
intensified indefinitely. Notions of what now passes for tolerably good
mental health are likely to be superseded. They will be written off as mood-congruent
pathologies of the primordial Darwinian psyche. Such ugly thoughts
and feelings will be diagnosed as typical of the tragic lives of emotional
primitives from the previous era. In time, the deliberate re-creation of
today's state-spectrum of normal waking and dreaming consciousness may be
outlawed as cruel and immoral.

Such speculations may
currently sound fantastical. Yet the ideas behind this manifesto may one day
be regarded as intellectually trite - albeit today morally
urgent. For as the genetic revolution in reproductive medicine unfolds, what might once have been the stuff of millennialist fantasy
is set to become a scientifically feasible research program. Its adoption
or rejection will become, ultimately, a social policy issue. Passively or
actively, we will have to choose just how much unpleasantness we
wish to create or conserve - if any - in eras to come.

0.2 Saving Vehicles With Bad Drivers.

Blind selective pressures have acted on living organisms over hundreds of
millions of years. Darwinian evolution has powerfully favoured the growth
of ever more diverse, excruciating, but also more adaptive varieties of psychophysical
pain. Its sheer nastiness effectively spurs and punishes the living
vehicles of genetic replicators. Sadness, anxiety and discontent are frequently
good for our genes; they're just psychologically bad for us. In absolute terms,
global suffering is probably still increasing as the population explosion
continues. Human ingenuity has struggled, often vainly, to rationalise and
somehow derive value from the most frightful anguish. But over the aeons, the
very anguish which intermittently corrodes the well-being of the individual
organism has differentially promoted the inclusive fitness of its DNA. Hence
it has tended to get inexorably worse.

Of course such doom-and-gloom
isn't the whole picture. The world's horrors can be contrasted with life's
rewarding experiences. People sometimes have fun. Long-lasting depression
is rarely adaptive. Yet what Michael Eysenck describes as the "hedonic treadmill"
ensures that very few of us can be very happy for very long. An interplay
of cruelly effective negative feedback mechanisms is at work in the central
nervous system. Feedback-inhibition ensures that a majority of people would
be periodically bored, depressed or angst-ridden in a recreated Garden of
Eden.

A small minority of humans
do in fact experience states of indefinitely prolonged euphoria. These states
of involuntary well-being are usually pathologised as "manic". Unlike unipolar
depression, sustained unipolar euphoric mania is very rare. Other folk who just have
high "hedonic set-points", but who aren't manic or bipolar, are sometimes
described as "hyperthymic" instead. This isn't a common mindset either.
"Bipolar disorder", on the other hand, is experienced in the course of a
lifetime by perhaps one in a hundred people or more. Popularly known as
manic-depression, bipolar disorder has several sub-types. Mood characteristically alternates
between euphoria and abject despair. Cycles may vary in length. It is a
complex genetic condition which runs in families. Typically, bipolarity
is marked by a genetic variation in the serotonin transporter as compared
to "euthymic" normals. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in sleep,
sociability, feeding, activity, impulse-control, mood, and a lot else besides. The serotonin
transporter mops up "excess" serotonin released by nerve cells into the
synapses. Very crudely, manic states are associated with enhanced dopamine
and norepinephrine function; in mania, serotonin function is dysregulated or low.

Sadly, among today's "bipolars"
manic exuberance can spin out of control. Euphoria may be accompanied by
hyperactivity, sleeplessness, chaotically racing ideas, pressure of speech
and grandiose thought. Hyper-sexuality, financial excesses and religious
delusions are common. So is rampant egomania. Sometimes dysphoria
may occur. In dysphoric mania the manic "high" is actually unpleasant. The
excited subject may be angry, agitated, panicky, paranoid, and destructive.
When in the grip of classic euphoric mania, however, it's hard to recognise
that anyone might think anything is wrong. This is because everything feels
utterly right. To suppose otherwise is like going to Heaven and then
being invited to believe there has been a mistake. It's not credible.

&nbsp Today, euphoric (hypo-)mania
is liable to be clinically subdued with drugs. ["Hypomania" denotes simply
a milder mania.] Toxic "medication" can depress elevated mood to duller
but "normal" levels. Such flatter and supposedly healthier levels of emotion
enable otherwise euphoric people to function within contemporary society.
Compliance with a medically-dictated treatment-regimen (lithium, sodium
valproate, carbamazepine, etc.) will be enhanced if the victim can be persuaded
that euphoric well-being is pathological. (S)he can then look for warning
signs and symptoms. By the norms of our genetically-enriched posterity,
however, it is the rest of us who are chronically unwell - if not more so.
Contemporary standards of mental health are just pathologically low. Our
super-well descendants, by contrast, will enjoy a glorious spectrum of new
options for mental super-health. They may opt to combine emotional stability, resilience and "serotonergic"
serenity, for instance, with the goal-oriented energy, optimism and initiative
of a raw "dopaminergic" high. Post-humans will discover that euphoric
peak experiences can be channelled, controlled and genetically diversified,
not just medically suppressed.

For there is a cruel irony
here. Clinically prescribed mood-darkeners would be laughably redundant
for the great bulk of humanity. At present, life for billions of genetically
"normal" people is often very grim indeed. No amount of piecemeal political
and economic reform, nor even radical social engineering, can overcome this
biological reality. Today's billion-and-one routes to supposedly lasting
happiness are pursued in the guise of innumerable intentional objects. [Intentionality
in philosophy-speak is the 'aboutness' or 'object-directedness' of thought].
We convince ourselves that all manner of things would potentially make us
happy. All these peripheral routes to personal fulfilment are not merely vastly circuitous and
inefficient. In the main, they just don't, and can't, durably work. At best,
they can serve as palliatives of the human predicament. If the
mind/brain's emotional thermostat, as it were, is not genetically and/or pharmacologically
reset, then even the greatest triumphs and successes turn to ashes. Lottery
winners, cup-final hat-trick scorers and blissful newly-weds are left time
and again to discover this fate anew. Even those of us who tend to lead
a relatively happy day-to-day existence will, in the course of a lifetime,
undergo spells of wretched unhappiness and disappointment. If we opt to have children, our corrupt code ensures they will periodically suffer a similar fate.

It would be easy but unwarranted
simply to extrapolate past and present trends into the indefinite future.
Usually, we assume without question that our descendants - however different
from us in other respects - will be biologically prone to suffer negative
states of consciousness. We suppose that future generations will sometimes
feel distress, both subtle and crude, just as we have always done ourselves.
Yet this assumption may be naïve. The neurochemical basis of feeling and
emotion is rapidly being unravelled. The human genome is going to get comprehensively decoded
and rewritten. In ages to come, it will become purely an issue of (post-)human
decision whether unpleasant modes of consciousness are generated in any
form or texture whatsoever. Aversive experience is a sinister anachronism in the age of post-genomic medicine.
We will soon have to decide if we should inflict suffering on ourselves
or on others. A terrible but once unavoidable fact of organic life then
becomes instead a matter for active moral choice when one decides upon the genetic make-up of one's future kids. And that choice can be
declined.

0.3 Humans Are Not Rats.

One possibility, though not an option to be canvassed here, is that in freeing
ourselves from the nightmarish legacy of our evolutionary past we might choose
to enjoy a lifetime of raw, all-consuming orgasmic bliss. This bliss needn't
be directed at any well-defined intentional objects. We - or more likely our
robot-serviced descendants - wouldn't be ecstatic about anything in particular.
Our nature would be constitutionally ecstatic. Genetically pre-programmed
euphoria would be as natural and inevitable as breathing. We would simply
be happy about being happy.

The defining image here,
perhaps, is the notional human counterpart of the experimenter's lever-pressing
rat. Microelectrodes can be implanted directly into the mind/brain's pleasure
centres. These lie in the mesolimbic dopamine system, the core of the brain's
reward circuitry. It extends from the ventral tegmentum to the nucleus accumbens,
with projections to the limbic system and orbitofrontal cortex. Notoriously,
the wired rat will indulge in frenzied bouts of intra-cranial self-stimulation
for days on end. The experience is so wonderful that it takes precedence
over food and sleep. Intra-cranial self-stimulation is
preferred even to sex. The rat doesn't need to
undergo a contrasting "low" to appreciate the "high". The little bundle
of joy is apparently incapable of becoming bored with, or physiologically
tolerant to, the rodent equivalent of Heaven.

Such animalistic images
are unedifying to all but the most unabashed hedonist. Yet more subtly engineered
human counterparts of the euphoric rat are perfectly feasible. Centuries
hence, any pleasure-maximising ecstatics will be using their personal freedom
to exercise what is, in an ethical utilitarian sense, a legitimate lifestyle choice.

The "wirehead" option,
however, will be only one item taken from a very large menu. Unfortunately,
it is also the most easily visualised. So the spectre of perpetual intra-cranial
self-stimulation can easily be taken, wrongly, to symbolise the whole approach
that The Hedonistic Imperative represents. The desperate ethical
urgency that underlies the abolitionist project may thus too easily
be dismissed. For humans, as we are solemnly reminded, are not rats.

0.4 Life In Dopaminergic Overdrive.

An important point to stress in the discussion to follow is that many dopamine-driven
states of euphoria can actually enhance motivated, goal-directed behaviour
in general. Enhanced dopamine function makes one's motivation to act stronger,
not weaker. Hyper-dopaminergic states tend also to increase the range
of activities an organism finds worth pursuing. Outside the pleasure-laboratory,
such states of necessity focus on countless different intentional objects.
So humanity's future as envisaged in this manifesto is not, or certainly not
just, an eternity spent enraptured on elixirs of super-soma or tanked up on
high-octane pleasure-machines. Nor is it plausible that posterity will enjoy
only the dullish, opiated sensibility of the heroin addict. Instead, an extraordinarily
fertile range of purposeful and productive activities will most likely be
pursued. Better still, our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our
elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we primitives
cruelly lack. For on offer are sights more majestically beautiful, music more
deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more
awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly
comprehend.

I shall first schematically
set out how a naturalistic, secular paradise of effectively everlasting
happiness is biotechnically feasible. Second, I will argue why its realisation
is instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. Third, I will offer
a sketch of when and why such a scenario is likely to come to pass in some
guise or other. And, finally, I shall try to anticipate some of the most
common if not always cogent objections that the prospect of psychochemical
nirvana is likely to arouse, and attempt to defuse them.